A vagina monologue from the author of 'Girl Interrupted'

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 21, 2001

After her spare but powerful 1993 memoir, "Girl, Interrupted," about her two years in a mental hospital, we expect boldness from Susanna Kaysen. She doesn't disappoint in her forthright opening lines: "If you have a vagina you know that most of the time it is without sensation. . . . The vagina is mostly like a pancreas and feels nothing. If it feels something, it is either erotically engaged or ill. . . . I have one, and something went wrong with it."

Clearly, "The Camera My Mother Gave Me," Kaysen's memoir about her vaginal pain, is not for the prudish. Kaysen uses her vagina as the "fulcrom" on which she pivots to consider specific aspects of existence: sexuality, medicine and aging. The pity is, she touches on these worthy issues gingerly, cringing from deeper consideration, as if, like her genitals, they are too sensitive to explore fully. Not just her prose but also her reflections are as stripped as her body on a doctor's examining table.

No modesty sheets or paper robes obscure Kaysen's graphic descriptions of how her vagina felt, "as if somebody had put a cheese grater in it and scraped . . . as if someone had poured ammonia inside it . . . as if a little dentist was drilling a little hole in it." She uses the same matter-of-fact tone to detail her efforts to find a cure. With simple, pared-down vocabulary and sentence structure, and liberal use of the f-word, she recounts her saga.

The first lesson of Kaysen's pilgrimage to her internist and to the gynecologist, who removed a cyst from one of her vaginal glands 20 years ago, is that medicine is an imprecise science limited by incomplete knowledge.

This is not news to anyone struggling with chronic ailments, but it warrants more discussion than it gets here. To Kaysen's credit, she does not rant against the medical profession. She is, in fact, respectful of most of her doctors, although she rarely follows their advice completely. For example, after a few sessions of pelvic exercises for biofeedback, she rebels against the "Urinazi" technician and dreams about toilet training: "I felt defiant and naughty and self-indulgent. . . . I'm like a little kid who won't cooperate. . . . This realization amazed and delighted me."

Kaysen's doctors try various antifungal, antibacterial and estrogen creams before sending her to an alternative health specialist and a vulvologist, whose arrogance Kaysen skewers. He diagnoses vestibulitis, prescribes novocaine cream and recommends surgery, which Kaysen balks at because of a woeful success rate. Kaysen sums up wryly: "Here are the things I put into my vagina over the next two months: vinegar rinses; saltwater soaks; a jelly formulated with the correct vaginal pH; and estrogen cream."

Pointedly missing from this list, perhaps because she didn't insert it herself, is her boyfriend's penis. And here's the rub. Kaysen complains repeatedly about being pressured into painful sex. As depicted in her condescending portrait, Kaysen's live-in boyfriend, whose name we never learn, is a Stanley Kowalski type, an "emotionally transparent," unsophisticated, vaguely threatening carpenter who does not accept her disability gracefully. Apparently, before Kaysen's vagina took sick, sex wasn't just the cornerstone of their relationship but pretty much the sum total of it. Kaysen admits that he is one of a long line of "inappropriate boyfriends." Some of Kaysen's friends suggest that perhaps Kaysen is "sick of him, literally."

When Kaysen starts parsing the distinction between coercion and rape, her book runs into serious trouble. Her story veers into narcissism and feels incomplete and disingenuous. This is not the first time Kaysen has written about an affair gone awry. Her first novel, "Asa, as I Knew Him," is an intriguing mix of memory, fantasy and revenge about a married employer with whom the narrator had an affair. But this time Kaysen fails to transform the material into something more than her own sorry predicament. When her boyfriend pushes her to use the prescribed novocaine or try surgery, she sees him motivated solely by his "toxic, incessant desire" rather than any concern for her.

Although her subject is changing sexuality, Kaysen fails to disclose her age -- 52 -- and cagily avoids what she calls "the age thing." If you haven't grown up, how can you face menopause? Her friends become surrogate parents, supporting and succoring. When she withdraws from the sexual arena after her boyfriend leaves, she describes her asexual self as dull and "infantilized."

Infantilized? She's backing down the hill rather than going over it. The first man she lusts for after a two-year moratorium on sex is "a million years" younger than she is, accessorized with tattoos, earrings and a motorcycle. She appraises him like a horse, "clean and healthy . . . carefully raised in a good family"; that is, not as a feeling person but as a means of waking up her dead vagina and putting color back in her life. She's devastated when he doesn't bite, sadly aware that "my sexual allure, on which I'd traded for most of my life, was fading away."

Much has been written about "autopathographies," the confessional strain of autobiographies that Kaysen's "Girl, Interrupted" helped foment. The pathology in question here is deeper than vaginal pain. This vagina monologue reveals an advanced case of the Peter Pan syndrome, a refusal to grow up. Had Kaysen done so, she might have written a far more compelling book.

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